Despite being a god, Jesus is unaccountably never able to speak for himself. For better or worse, he has his friends to defend his good name (in this case, it’s for worse). The seven points we’ve analyzed so far from Christian apologist Tom Gilson have been full of holes (part 1 here). Here are the final three.

[EDIT: Gilson wrote a second post in response. Find the link at the bottom of post 2.]

8. Bible slavery was nothing like American slavery

“Slavery was absolutely woven into the economy and culture of the day. It was nothing like southern chattel slavery, of course. If you’re thinking slavery in 1830s Alabama, you’re not thinking of slavery in first century Greco-Roman or Judaic culture.”

No, I’m thinking about slavery as sanctioned by God in the Old Testament. If morality isn’t relative, as Christian apologists insist, God’s rules about slavery should always be in vogue, whether given 3000 years ago or yesterday.

Let’s have a quiz. To compare biblical and American slavery, we’ll take Gilson’s claim as a challenge. I’ll paraphrase two slave laws. One is from Alabama from the 1830s and the other from the Old Testament. See if you can tell which is which.

Law 1: If, through abuse, a slave owner dismembers or kills a slave, that slave owner shall be punished as if he had committed the same offense on a free person.

Law 2: A slave owner is assumed to treat his property responsibly, and that includes beating as may be necessary. A beating shall be considered abuse only if the slave dies or is unable to return to work within two days.

(The sources of these two laws are given at the end of this post.*)

Gilson said, “[Slavery as prescribed in the Bible] was nothing like southern chattel slavery, of course.”

Wrong. American slavery and biblical slavery were pretty much identical. I make that comparison here.

If slavery improved in first-century Judea as compared to Old Testament times, I would like to see evidence that it was due to Judaism. “Well, yeah, they had slavery in Palestine, but it wasn’t that bad” is hardly a bold endorsement of God’s society on earth. I think it’s fair to insist on high moral standards for the Creator of the universe.

(This is where apologists will point to The Fall® and say that society’s problems are all mankind’s fault. (1) This argument fails, and (2) blaming it all on people is exactly what you’d say if you were stuck defending a god who didn’t exist.)

The god who spoke the universe into existence could probably find a solution to slavery. As usual, Christians have their god running from opportunities to show he exists.

9. You underestimate how entrenched slavery was

“[Slavery] was embedded in the social structure, so deep that you must realize there’s no way anyone could have just ended slavery. The Greeks, Romans, and Jews had no conception of widespread voluntary employment. There’s no chance that Jesus or anyone could have instituted it overnight. They’d have been slaughtered for trying.”

Remind me sometime to explain what “omnipotent” means.

God is (supposedly) magic. If God wanted slavery gone tomorrow, he could make that so.

And don’t tell me that slavery is part of God’s marvelous plan. Whatever God expects to achieve through abysmal living conditions, he could achieve with magic. And the existence of slavery has a straightforward natural explanation. The God hypothesis adds nothing.

What sounds more likely—God dictating the rules of slavery in the Old Testament and letting it persist through history or “God” being a human invention, just like all the other gods?

10. Jesus did end slavery, just not right away

“What was needed was a revolution of the heart, which [Jesus] led, and then the gradual development of economic and social structures to fill the place slavery had held. It resulted over time in the ending of slavery in Europe; and in fact, there is no place on earth where slavery was abolished except under the influence of Jesus Christ.”

There are more slaves today than ever! “Revolution of the Heart” might work as the title of a pop song, but it’s just handwaving to imagine it having changed the world. The Ten Commandments, purportedly from God himself, banned lying, stealing, or murder almost 3000 years ago. How did that revolution work out?

Why focus on just slaves in Europe when Jesus’s “revolution” was for the whole world? But let’s ignore that and focus on the claim that there are no slaves in Europe. The 2018 Global Slavery Index says that today there are more than 10,000 slaves each in Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Greece, and the Netherlands. And more than 100,000 in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the UK.

Data on France says that most of its slaves are prostitutes, with domestic work being the second largest category. Additionally, France annually imports $15 billion in products at risk of being produced by forced labor. Germany has similar numbers—90% of its slaves are prostitutes and $30 billion in imports are possibly produced by forced labor.

Gilson tells us that it pleased God to handle this humanitarian crisis in a gradual manner. No need to rush in headlong and eliminate vast amounts of human suffering all at once, right? Jesus couldn’t just end slavery but had to work through William Wilberforce (a Christian) to end the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833.

And Jesus also worked through France’s very atheistic Revolutionary government to end slavery there in 1794. And haphazardly through other countries throughout history, I guess. (How frustrating it must be to be omnipotent and yet constrained by inept humans.)

Who’s responsible—Christians or Christianity?

It is maddening to find Christian apologists who claim their god can do anything but then must explain how God stepped back when any of us with that power would’ve stepped up. They tap dance away from the fact that whatever they claim God did is more easily explained by it coming about naturally or due to human action.

Now consider his final claim, “There is no place on earth where slavery was abolished except under the influence of Jesus Christ.” One Greek scholar said in the fourth century BCE, “God has left all men free; Nature has made nobody a slave.” Where in the Bible does Jesus say something like that? Stoicism was a school of philosophy founded in Greece about a century later. Abolition of slavery was not a tenet, but they got a lot closer than Christianity did, and three centuries earlier. Gilson will point out that the Stoics had no principles rejecting slavery, but then neither does Christianity.

Gilson’s error is in conflating the actions of people who happened to follow Jesus and the principles of Jesus. Did Christians eliminate slavery in Europe? Not exclusively, but largely. Was that because they were Christian? I await the evidence that atheists couldn’t have done the same thing.

And let’s be clear that simply making a Bible-y argument doesn’t count. I have made arguments aimed at Christians supported with Bible verses, and I’m an atheist. I need to see a convincing argument that these Christians from centuries past wouldn’t have been abolitionists if they hadn’t been Christians. If they were simply expressing human morality, remember that atheists can be good people, too.

Not only did Christianity not end slavery quickly (as one would expect if the anti-slavery case made by Jesus were as strong as Gilson claims it was), it even supported it. In 1205, the pope authorized the slavery of Jews “because they crucified the Lord.” A decree from the pope in 1452 allowed the king of Portugal to enslave Arabs and pagans and then take their land and property. And in 1866, the pope sent instructions to a Roman Catholic authority in Ethiopia that said, in part, “Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law.”

If Jesus missed the boat, he had company. Christianity looks to be people all the way down.

Concluded in part 4.

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*Law 1 is from the 1833 Alabama law code: “Any person who shall maliciously dismember or deprive a slave of life, shall suffer such punishment as would be inflicted in case the like offence had been committed on a free white person.”

Law 2 is from Exodus 21:20–21: “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.”

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Image from Kirill Pershin (free-use license)
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Apologist Tom Gilson says that Jesus was “too good to be false,” but how good was Jesus when he did nothing to eliminate slavery? Gilson steps in to defend his always-mute buddy, who is curiously never able to defend himself despite being a god. Part 1 responded to Gilson’s first four points: Jesus came to set the captives free, Jesus got killed to reconcile humanity with God, slavery can’t survive in the face of the Golden Rule, and Jesus was anti-greed.

Gilson replied to part 1 yesterday. He said that I didn’t understand Jesus’s role on earth.

Jesus came to found a revolution of love. He showed humans’ essential equality. He condemned the enslaving spirit at its very root, which is greed and self-centeredness.

Okay, let’s go with that. Let’s say that that was Jesus’s mission. Gilson is making my point: that’s what Jesus did, but what he didn’t do was declare that slavery was wrong. He had bigger fish to fry, and ending slavery wasn’t on his short list.

Let’s return to Gilson’s article about slavery. Maybe the next three points will be stronger.

5. “[Jesus] taught love for all, even enemies, which must lead to the realization that all persons have equal worth”

Oh, please. There’s the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and then there’s the miscellany of Iron Age rules that passes for morality in the Bible. One of these feels enlightened and familiar, and the other has to be propped up like a scarecrow. It’s easy to tell the difference.

The Old Testament prohibited inter-tribal marriage and demanded genocide and human sacrifice. Yahweh was the champion for just his Chosen People, not the world, since other tribes had their own gods. He found room for “no coveting” in his Ten Commandments, but “no slavery” didn’t make the cut.

Jesus in the New Testament said, “Don’t throw pearls before swine” (Matthew 7:6) and “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” (Matt. 15:24).

Gilson’s “all persons have equal worth” is not a clear message from the Bible. In fact, any useful moral sentiment from Christianity is simply a regifting of human morality.

6. “[Jesus] taught sexual morality”

“[This] undercut one of the most unpleasant aspects of slavery as it was practiced then.”

Presumably Gilson is talking about sex being a job requirement for some slaves.

But how does Jesus look in this analysis? That very thing is presented favorably in the Old Testament. Numbers 31:18 has Moses telling his soldiers that, as spoils of the battle against Midian, the virgin girls are for them. That’s 32,000 virgins.

Part of “sexual morality” is the idea of consent, and whether these girls were treated as sex slaves, concubines, or wives, their wishes were obviously unimportant. Women were treated as property in the Bible.

Of course, one can always say that the Old Testament had some barbaric morality and that Jesus came to correct it. This can be understood through a sociological lens, where Christianity was an evolution of thought from Judaism. And Islam, Mormonism, Christian Science, and others are evolved versions of Christianity. But if we assume Christianity is more than just a cultural artifact and is actually the one correct worldview, Yahweh and Jesus are part of the same godhead. If Jesus understood correct morality, surely Yahweh understood it equally well. The apologist is left explaining how Yahweh got it so wrong.

7. Jesus’s overall anti-slavery message was clear

“[Jesus] may not have said the word ‘slavery,’ but his teaching cut every leg out from under it. No one could fully follow his teaching and continue treating persons as objects, as less than human.”

And yet no gospel rejects slavery. No epistle. Nothing in the Bible as a whole.

The indifference we find in Jesus we also see in Paul:

Were you a slave when you were called [to be a Christian]? Don’t let it trouble you. . . . Each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them (1 Corinthians 7:21–4).

Paul is sometimes said to take a bold stand against slavery in the epistle of Philemon, but that was just a letter with an appeal for clemency for one runaway slave that happened to be a friend of Paul’s. It was no attack on the institution.

The New Testament is actually supportive of slavery.

Slaves, be obedient in everything to your earthly masters (Colossians 3:22).

Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate but also to those who are harsh (1 Peter 2:18).

One passage even throws Jesus under the bus:

All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect. . . . If anyone teaches otherwise and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, [they understand nothing] (1 Timothy 6:1–3).

An almost universal argument Christian apologists make is to handwave that whatever the Bible is talking about, it’s not real slavery, not slavery as it was practiced in the United States. Biblical slavery, they’ll tell us, was just indentured servitude—a temporary situation used as a last resort to pay a debt.

God himself makes clear that there was more to biblical slavery than that.

[God said,] “Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. . . . You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life” (Leviticus 25:44–6).

With (temporary) indentured servitude and slavery for life, American and biblical slavery were pretty much identical.

[EDIT: Gilson wrote a second post in response here. Once all four of my posts are out, we’ll see what Gilson has to say in total. I hope it’s worth a response. So far, I’m getting a lot of “Seidensticker should’ve read my book.” The original post was primarily about his book, with slavery only used as an example, but the slavery issue seemed a lot more interesting than the book.]

Gilson’s final three points are considered in the next post.

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Image from Paul Brooker (license CC BY 2.0)
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Let’s continue this critique of an apologetics.com podcast that responded to Dan Savage’s claim that the Bible is “radically pro-slavery.” Italicized arguments are my paraphrases of arguments from the podcast. (Part 1 here.)

4. The Bible rejects slavery. “Slavery” in the Bible is simply not the same thing as slavery in the United States. For example, consider Ex. 21:16:

Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession.

See? A rejection of slavery, right there in the Bible.

Nope. This refers just to Jews kidnapping Jews to be sold in other countries—see the NET Bible comment on this verse. The Bible makes a clear distinction between Jews as slaves and members of other tribes as slaves.

Why is the atheist educating the Christians about their own holy book? Don’t they read it? Don’t they know about these two aspects of biblical slavery?

5. Biblical slavery was NOT American slavery. “We have a very different view here of what slavery was [comparing American slavery with biblical slavery] and you can see that it’s heavily regulated.”

Yes, slavery was regulated, just like commerce. And, like commerce, slavery was kosher from God’s standpoint.

And yes, Africans enslaved in America was different than Jews enslaved by Jews. We’ll get to that.

On the podcast, Brooks read the rules for treating Jewish slaves from Exodus 21:2–8. A Jewish slave must be freed after six years; any wife or children that came with him would be free to go, but if the master buys him a wife, she remains behind; if the slave can’t bear to leave his wife, he can remain if he promises to be a slave for life; there are special rules for how to sell your daughter into slavery; and so on.

This is rather like indentured servitude used in the American colonies, the contract by which someone would be transported to the New World in return for five or so years of work. These were European servants working for European masters.

The Bible defines two kinds of slave

But, incredibly, the discussion didn’t address the elephant in the room: the biblical rules for non-Jewish slavery. This conversation went on for an hour, so it’s not like they didn’t have time. Are they really unaware of this? Or was this a deliberate deception on their part, a wager on the ignorance of their audience?

Well, if they won’t discuss it, I’ll be happy to. Let’s wallow in the Bible’s radically pro-slavery message.

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites [harshly]. (Lev. 25:44–46)

This doesn’t look like indentured servitude, Toto. Indeed, this looks very much like the slavery for life (chattel slavery) in America that the speakers were so frantic to distance themselves from. The Jews treated the folks from their own tribe better than “those people” from other tribes. Sound familiar?

Much is made in the Old Testament of how God rescued the Jews from slavery in Egypt, but slavery was a terrible burden only when applied to us. When it’s applied to them, that’s a very different story. In fact, the Jews enslaved the tribe of the Gibeonites as soon as they returned to Canaan after the exodus from Egypt (Joshua 9:23).

More biblical demands for slavery:

When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. (Deut. 20:10–11)

You could argue that slavery is better than being killed, which the following verses make clear is the alternative. Indeed, the hosts make points like this—slavery is better than dying, slavery is the merciful alternative, Old Testament rules were kinder than those in some neighboring countries, and so on.

But I gotta wonder—is this is the best that can be said about the greatest moral document in history, that it wasn’t as bad as the morality in surrounding countries? This is the best an omniscient, omni-benevolent God can do?

Speaking of forced labor, this is how King Solomon worked his famous mines (1 Kings 9:20–22).

Then there’s the category of sex slaves (or sex workers or concubines or whatever):

Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. (Num. 31:17–18; see also Deut. 21:11)

And no slave manual would be complete without a rule for how to beat slaves correctly:

If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property. (Ex. 21:20–21)

Again, this sounds very much like slavery in America. These biblical laws sound similar to the laws governing the practice of slavery in America. Some of these also protected slaves. For example, the 1739 South Carolina code fined someone who killed a slave £700 and limited the number of hours that slaves could be made to work. The 1833 Alabama law code dictated, “Any person who shall maliciously dismember or deprive a slave of life, shall suffer such punishment as would be inflicted in case the like offence had been committed on a free white person.”

Despite the hosts’ protestations to the contrary, American slavery and biblical slavery were quite similar institutions.

Concluded in Part 3.

He that will not reason is a bigot; 
he that cannot reason is a fool; 
he that dares not reason is a slave.
— William Drummond

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/9/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

You’ve probably been there. You’ve read one too many articles claiming that biblical slavery was not a big deal, that it was actually a good thing for the enslaved, or that biblical slavery wasn’t at all like slavery in America.

Let’s go there.

Seattle columnist Dan Savage delivered a lecture in 2012 to high school students interested in journalism. His point, roughly stated, was that we discard lots of nutty stuff from the Old Testament (no shellfish, slavery, animal sacrifice, etc.), so let’s discard hatred of homosexuality as well.

Christian podcast apologetics.com responded on 5/13/12 with “Sex, Lies & Leviticus” (the second hour is the interesting part, with host Lindsay Brooks and guest Arthur Daniels Jr.). The interview begins with the guest mocking Savage’s claim that the Bible is “radically pro-slavery.”

The Bible is pro-slavery in the same way that it’s pro-commerce. The book of Proverbs says that God demands honest weights and measures—four times, in fact. Commerce is regulated, so it’s pretty clear that God has no problem with commerce. God is happy to set down prohibitions against wicked things, and there are none against honest commerce. By similar thinking (the regulation and the lack of prohibition), the Bible is pro-slavery.

But more on that later—let’s critique the arguments in the interview. Some of the arguments are truly ridiculous, but I include them for completeness and to give atheists a chance to become aware of them and Christians to realize what arguments need discarding.

1. Selection. The Bible prohibits lots of things, not just homosexuality. Dan Savage is happy with prohibitions against murder, rape, stealing, and so on. Why accept most of the Law but reject just the bits you don’t like?

Because no atheist goes to the Bible for moral guidance! No one, including Christians, know that murder, rape, and stealing are wrong because they read it in the Bible. They knew they were wrong first and saw that, coincidentally, the Bible rejects the same things. Our moral compass is internal, and from that we can critique the Bible to know what to keep (don’t murder) and what to reject (acceptance of slavery).

2. Food Laws. Dan Savage ridicules the kosher food laws (rejections of shellfish, for example), but Paul’s epistle of First Timothy (4:4–5) overturns these food restrictions.

In the first place, Pauline authorship for 1 Timothy is largely rejected by biblical scholars. Apparently, these guys want Christians to follow some random dude rather than Jesus himself, who never questioned the kosher laws and indeed demanded that they be upheld. Jesus said:

Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:17–20)

And secondly, laws aren’t considered and rejected one by one. Do they have a counter-verse to reject death for adultery (Lev. 20:10), for sassing your parents (Lev. 20:9), and every other nutty Old Testament prohibition that no Christian follows? Christians more typically reject the Old Testament laws with a blanket claim that the sacrifice of Jesus made those laws unnecessary (for example, see Hebrews chapters 7, 8, and 10).

The problem there, of course, is that prohibitions against homosexual acts are discarded along with the rest. You don’t get to keep just the ones you’re fond of. I discuss this more here.

3. Ignorance. Dan Savage is speaking out of turn. Like other atheists, he simply doesn’t know his Bible well.

Or not. American atheists are famously better informed than any religious group. And we’ll see that Savage is on target about slavery.

Continued in Part 2.

Americans treat the Bible 
like a website Terms of Use agreement. 
They don’t bother reading it; they just click “I agree.”
— Unknown

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/7/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia